I was sitting under the kitchen table watching my mother make marmalade when Kennedy was shot - I remember her bursting into tears and listening to the radio, telling me to shush!
When Lennon was shot I was on my way to a union chapel meeting with some colleagues, and we all immediately said this was going to be a "where were you when..." moment.
When the Challenger shuttle blew up I was giving a talk on journalism to a bunch of teenagers at a young offenders' unit. The talk came to an abrupt halt as we all watched the television murmuring "F***ing hell!".
When Lady Di hit the underpass I was hellishly hung-over at a friend's in Norfolk, and came downstairs to find 11 messages awaiting me to do interview and analysis crap on the situation, all of which I ignored to carry on laying a hedge. I lived just around the corner from Kensington Palace, and when I got home on the Sunday night the place was completely surrounded by weird people and TV crews. A pal from Channel 4 came back to the flat with a cameraman and we demolished a bottle of whisky before I went to CNN to do a two-hour transatlantic talkie, pissed as a fart, with a mate from the Daily Telegraph. Boy, did we spout some bollocks that night!
On September 11 I was in a directors' meeting when the receptionist rang through and told us to put on the television. We watched agog for about two hours and then adjourned the meeting to the pub over the road, where everyone else seemed in a state of shock.